I understand why people want to remember this, but man, I got sick of getting blamed for it every year until Jr. High. Last year I think the date that my car got vandalized was a coincidence, but my driver’s side mirror got smashed off on Dec. 7th.
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Partly tongue and cheek and partly serious here. Being a Christian cishet male hasn’t been all fun and games lately. Not that I am oppressed, but I am accused an awful lot.
I said this on another board. “Racism is colour blind.” That goes for just about any bigotry. The problem is, you can be and intelligent person who doesn’t believe that they are at all prejudice or bigoted, but still have blind spots. I have them too. The goal is to keep looking for them and address them when you see them.
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I am a work in progress.
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Since when does “space opera” have rules? As an Asimov adherent, I’ve always held to the idea that not following rules of science is the defining characteristic of space opera, as opposed to SF.
For what it’s worth, I have never, and will never, hold you personally accountable for anything that happened before either of us was born. 
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That shit the day after you were born? Totes your fault.
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That’s why it’s refreshing to read a series that does!
I’m rereading the Action Figures series by Michael C. Bailey. They’re a fun read, like the Don’t Tell My Parents series by Richard Roberts
I’m back on my Brandon Sanderson kick so I’m doing what seems to be an annual rereading of the Stormlight archive books.
I jumped on the Terry Pratchett e-book Humble Bundle a month or two ago, so I’m about 25 books deep into Discworld. I read most of them while I was in Ukraine in 2021 via library app, but now I’m filling in the gaps.
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Who ever said Lovecraft’s work was fiction?
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I like the take from a Charles Stross short story where Lovecraft’s writing is to the “trutth” of the setting as the Anarchist’s Cookbook is to an understanding of chemistry… a collection of half-truths, mistakes, and dangerous shortcuts as likely to do nothing as to cause explosions.
This is in a setting where there are dimensions of horrible creatures often summoned by the applied mathematics that make up magic.
And in both cases some of the errors are intentional to prevent something even worse from happening.
Just finished re-reading Allen Steele’s Orbital Decay. I read it when it was much newer and I had just graduated to the “adult” science fiction shelves at t(e local library,
It’s aged as well as could be expected. Steele was perhaps a bit optimistic in the longevity of the Grateful Dead (who get name-checked a bit) in stories of what was the near future and is now the recent past that never was.
One reason I returned to this book and the series it is part of is the most recent season of For All Mankind which focused on a similar theme of space travel transitioning from explorers on the frontier to simply another dangerous, boring job. Later books in the series even have labor disputes on Mars as a major plot element, echoing FAM. It’s got a big plot but much of it is world-building to a first generation of space workers taking the mantle of offshore oil platform workers and similar.
There’s a few bits that seem worse now: one scene uses a racial slur to demonstrate a character’s unbalanced state for example. And some contentious was probably a bit mature for me, who would have been around 12 when this came out.
A later book in the series did address the historical aspects a bit: the protagonist is a 90s twenty-something frozen after an accident and given a new life, so the dated music references are a bit more appropriate… although a character in that book still has a Grateful Dead obsession.
There are still people who are obsessed with Elvis, Frank Sinatra, or Bach, so that’s not so unbelievable.
Having been around construction/heavy equipment/military workers off and on in my life, you’ll hear just about any slur said by just about anyone there. If it’s a roughneck sort of atmosphere the author is going for then that’s just window dressing, and I would imagine being on another planet would make those types of workers care even less.
The concept of the book sounds interesting though, love me some worldbuilding. is For All Mankind any good?
I enjoyed it, the first season of For All Mankind was excellent. I felt a couple seasons faltered a bit but the most recent had some really good plot lines. I won’t be sad if the next season is the last as I’ve heard mentioned.
It starts with alt history of the moon landing being a Soviet triumph… This leads to a very different Space Race as goals shift. Subsequent seasons build on this base and jump forward through the decades with a setting that has more space technology than our world. Some were bothered by aging makeup on a few characters, but it didn’t bother me.
I’ve just finished ‘The Doctor of Hiroshima’ by Dr Michihiko Hachiya. If anyone wants a first-hand view of what the survivors (and victims) went through, have a read of this book. He never thought of publishing it, so it’s quite emotionless and matter-of-fact. My only criticism is that it ends far too soon (late September 1945).
Current book is ‘The Ultimate Guide to Japanese Yokai’ by Zack Davisson. Plenty of wood-block illustrations and pretty well research, but plagued by terrible editing and zero proof reading. I found 3 simple (and painfully obvious) mistakes in the Introduction alone.
We all know what Chingrish is.
You must’ve found the Japgrish version.